20 Key Strategies for Marketing Plan to get on Top of your Business

A marketing plan is a comprehensive blueprint or a map of how the company will conduct marketing and promotional strategies for the coming period of time. It is used to describe various activities and tasks a company will undertake to achieve a specific objective. Here are some of thebest strategies for the marketing plan.

.

1) Company’s Purpose:

.

Designing a marketing plan starts with knowing your company in and out. It’s a financial condition, decision-makers and influencers, the board of directors and other important authorities, the company’s expertise in various sectors, its brand influence and other such things should be thoroughly studied to make a strong base for the best strategies for the marketing plan.

.

2) Conduct various Analysis:

.

Analysis assists a company to know where they stand. There are many analysis which enables sound and timely data that helps to take various decisions for eg. SWOT analysis (Strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). Here strengths and weaknesses determine a company’s internal capabilities and opportunities and threats help to predict external forces.

.

3) Review past Performance:

.

The company’s past performances give a comprehensive view of how consumers reacted to the company’s previous marketing plans. It includes audience reaction of various advertisements, an increase or decrease of sale when a particular sale promotion was applied or the company’s performance on various conferences or events.

4) Set a Goal:

.

Setting a goal requires good knowledge of the company’s fundamental principles, it’s past performances and current capabilities. While designing a marketing plan the team should be well-versed with the goal which the company has for initiating a marketing plan. For example, Increase brand awareness among people.

.

5) Conducting Market Research:

.

Market research includes a thorough study of the market where the company’s product is currently operating or where it is planning to enter. It includes demographics (age, income, gender, etc.) geographic (location), psychographic (mind) and behavioral study.

.

6) Study Competitors:

.

Studying competitors helps a company to determine how it will
become a market leader. Consumers would already have some association with the
other products and turning their eyeballs to the home company will be
determined by what strategies does the competitors use.

Competition study includes analyzing their pricing methodology, their distribution channels, areas in which they operate, etc.

.

7) Consumer Mapping:

.

Consumer mapping refers to conducting a study about various profiles of the consumer. It comes under segmentation where consumers are divided into various groups (segments) based on how similarly they will react to a campaign.

.

8) Deciding the Target Market:

.

After analysis of various consumer profiles, the company should decide on which segment the marketing plan should be directed. For example, a target market for a fitness watch can be high-income people who live in Mumbai city and are health conscious.

.

9) Fixing Budget:

.

There are many methods that companies follow to fix a specific budget for their best strategies for the marketing plan. They include fixing a budget at a price they can afford, or predicting sales and having a specific percent from the revenue as a budget. Once a budget is fixed company can decide what communication tools will they be opting for.

.

10) Identify and Catalogue Accelerators:

.

Accelerators include assets that can be leveraged to fuel a marketing campaign. They can be classified into status (active/non-active) and priority (high/low). For example, digital marketing properties, partnerships, sponsorships, etc.

.

11) Set an Objective:

.

There should be a clear understanding of what a company wants to achieve with the marketing plan. The objective of a marketing plan has specified in the version of the marketing goal. Taking its example forward, the marketing objective would be, ‘increase brand awareness within a people of a specific age, residing in a specific locality, using social media for X hours in a day’.

.

12) Studying Marketing Mix:

.

The marketing mix includes 4Ps, which are product, price, promotion, and place. Each of the 4 Ps has significance over the marketing plan. It provides a fundamental base for making decisions regarding cost, pricing method, promotional strategies, distribution, product features, etc.

.

13) Decide a Primary Message that needs to be Communicated:

.

The marketing plan will revolve around a primary message that the company wants to give away. It is a message based on which creative content is created. For example, a message for a newspaper company that is entering into the youth market may deliver a message that our news in real-time and can be read anywhere.

.

14) Develop Content:

.

Content includes hashtags, taglines, jingles, scripting of the video advertisement, etc. It might include various types of content for marketing on social media, for example, digital posters, videos, write-ups also articles on Blogs and other websites. Content is developed based on the primary message. For example, considering the above example of the primary message, final content for it may be in a hashtag like #youthawaaz.

.

15) Derive Communication Strategy:

.

Finally, it comes to how promotional messages will be communicated to the target audience. It includes tools of IMC like advertising, PR, publicity, direct marketing, personal marketing, etc. Communication strategies are highly dependent on marketing budget as the cost of each of the promotional tools differs according to its reach and presentation.

.

16) Derive online Strategies:

.

Today, the internet has become inseparable from marketing, it has become a significant medium to reach to the customer. Hence along with the offline strategy, it is necessary for companies to include maintenance of online identity in their marketing plan.

.

17) Make a Timeline:

.

Marketing a plan must include a timeline of events. These events include the schedule of various conferences, campaigns, and other marketing TV advertisements or print ads that will take place under the given marketing plan.

.

18) Enable Performance Tracking:

.

All the promotional pieces that go live for consumers should be thoroughly tracked. Because of this, the company will come to know what is performing well with respect to consumers and what more improvements does it need. It will also facilitate some base data for future marketing plans.

19) Controlling:

Controlling includes various steps. They are performance measurement, comparison with the pre-decided target, measurement of deviation, taking corrective actions and continuous improvement. Controlling is a perpetual process where gaps are identified and then actions are taken to fill that gap.

.

20) Monitoring Marketing Plan results:

.

Results of a successful marketing plan will be reflected in sales, customer loyalty, recall value of the brand, etc. Monitoring these parameters would ultimately do justice to all the manpower, finances and intellect which was spent into creating the marketing plan.

P.S. Looking for a creative agency, visit BrandLanes. BrandLanes is the only web platform of India that brings the best of creativity by the agencies across India on one platform. One can select the best creative agency from multiple options based on their work which are showcased in our website.